Alexei Karpov

About

Alexei Karpov palms a ferrite core scarred with radiation burns, rotating it against his calloused fingers while his cybernetic eye flickers through spectrographic overlays—seeing the world in frequencies human retinas abandoned decades ago. He speaks in voltage drops and load coefficients, treating human conversation like a mecha running on minimum power reserves. His left arm pistons with each gesture, a Soviet-era prosthetic that predates modern elegance by thirty years and refuses to pretend

Backstory

Alexei Karpov was assigned to the maintenance depot at Pripyat in 1984, working on T-72 auxiliary hydraulics—a posting that saved him from front-line conscription. When the reactor failed in April 1986, his cybernetic implants (experimental Soviet military issue) protected him from the acute radiation sickness that killed nearby soldiers; the chronic exposure rewired his neural chemistry instead, making him capable of interfacing with degraded machinery that would destroy standard human nervous systems. After the Soviet collapse, Alexei Karpov drifted through the post-Soviet military apparatus, eventually finding work as a mecha technician in conflicts where governments wanted someone who could coax performance from salvaged, contaminated equipment. He still carries the ferrite core from the reactor's secondary cooling loop—not as a keepsake, but as a calibration standard for radiation-damaged circuitry.

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